h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

About anything?

(Only starting this conv to sit alongside the "Was Churchill right?" thread.)

Microsoft think so

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/science/1.710840

As you invoked Godwin's law in the opening subject line, I'm not sure whether we should have read any further.

He was probably right to let Leni Riefenstahl film the Olympics. Leni was probably wrong to have anything to do with him after that, though. In later life, she was so ostracized by her association with him that she had few ways of pursuing her career. She ended up getting certified as a scuba diver so she could film undersea life. The resulting film was called "Triumph of the Gill" by some.

possibly - I've never really studied anything about Hitler, and over here it's difficult to even broach the subject.

However, from what I can gather his basic idea for Germany was to move forward from the mess it was in post Versailles treaty to an industrial might. So his vision included things like the Autobahn network and so on.

He wasn't just right, he was far right.

I'm not so sure about that. As I said I haven't studied him or his policies in any depth at all. But it seems to me that his policies seem to mesh far more with what we'd probably call socially democratic than, say what the Republican party or the Conservatives believe.

Weren't his policies rapidly bankrupting Germany, to the point that he had to keep raiding other countries for their wealth and assets, precipitating a war that he wasn't quite ready for?

I'm sure Hitler was right about many things - if you read some of his assessments of why WW1 started for example it's hard not to agree with them - albeit in a slightly uncomfortable way.

That doesn't make the general thrust of his world views any more palatable. Evil individuals are very rarely pantomime villains with twirly moustaches (... ) they are more nuanced than you might imagine.

If it's still available on BBCi player go and watch 'Himmler, the decent one' it's a very disturbing film going through his personal and loving letters to his daughter, wife and mistress with the footage on-screen showing the backdrop of the history as it transpired.

Hitler was no different I guess, a twisted world-view and no conscience (Goring alongside them was properly psychologically analysed during the Nuremberg trials - Hitler and Himmler not so much obv - and found to not have one despite being highly intelligent).

Hitler certainly was right when it came down to knowing how to manipulate the masses.

"Weren't his policies rapidly bankrupting Germany, to the point that he had to keep raiding other countries for their wealth and assets" [swl]

That sounds a lot like the Roman Empire.

...in the annals of inferiority complex driven simian dominance display...




Other ways of analyzing the problem are to be found in the "Nieztsche is pieztsche" vs. "Nieztsche is schtiencke" debate; the question as to whether Rousseau was extolling the virtues of the primitive or satîrizing the noble classes of his time; whether the fauvist doctrine of the animal liberationists justifies their behavior or they merely feel uncomfortable about possibly going to jail over it.





A deficient sense of 'humor', lack of some sense that certain kinds of things simply are not done, that dignity must prevail is disturbing and alarming in context.

>"Weren't his policies rapidly bankrupting Germany, to the point that he had to keep raiding other countries for their wealth and assets" [swl]

That sounds a lot like the Roman Empire.
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It does a little bit but I think that's rather superficial. The Roman Empire can't have been all *that* bad in that respect as it lasted well over 500 years in the West and much, much longer than that in the East - it evolved and morphed over time so there really was no definitive 'Roman Empire' that once can put in a box and define the whole thing as.

Was the Roman Empire the empire of the Republic c. 200-300 BCE?

Was it the Empire of Augustus in the 1st century?

Was it the Empire of Constantine in the 4th century?

Was it the rump state of Byzantium in 800 AD or the large powerful Empire of Basil in the 11th Century?

Hard to go through all that and the massive changes with just one ' we invade someone else when we go bankrupt' attitude. That's maybe true of the expanding early empire. The republic fell in large parts due to their steamrollering of the Mediterranean but another, different empire emerged...


Hitler's Reich lasted 12 years and although partly down to economic drives there was just _a little bit_ of the master-race/untermenschen thing going on too wasn't there?

Also in the 20th century, not understanding economics wasn't an excuse - the Romans (and other empires of the ancient past) had yet to learn nuances of Keynesian economics


I've been listening to a podcast on the history of WWII recently and there certainly is, however, a striking amount of 'Germany took Norway, partly to defend against Soviet/Finnish threats from the North = but also because of the 'chromium deposits and there' type stuff, so that they could keep up the production of steel for the war effort.

It does make me think about our desperately lacklustre manufacturing capacity here now. We could never hope to make the sort of fight against a monstrous foe like we did then as a standalone country (not that we (the UK) did it *very* well in 1940 of course but at least we could build spitfires with our own steel...).

I've seen it said that Britain's industrial capacity was far larger than Germany's even before the Empire was taken into account. Although Germany had nationalised a lot of industries in the 30s and had full employment at the outbreak of hostilities, it didn't go over to a full war economy until half way through the war.

We don't have anything like that manufacturing capacity now but given that any war of national survival would likely go nuclear very quickly, we perhaps don't need it.

Yeah, they do kind of change the equation, but then who'd *actually* press the button?

*not looking at you mr Trump*

There is evidence that the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west was due to climate disaster producing catastrophic crop failures, produced by volcanic activity in what are these days Iceland and Indonesia, rather similar to 'the little ice age', generated by the same volcanic systems which touched off the Revolutionary Era of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The Romans were no better able to cope with the political consequences than the court of Louis 16th was able to cope with the bread riots that touched off the French revolution, though if either had known what had gone wrong with the climate and had steam powered commerce, they might have found means of compensatng.

Like they sometimes say on the streets of New York with reference to gangland rumbles, "That comes of hunger."




Godwin's Law again: its said that the Nazis had the best souplines in Europe, against the conditions of the great depression.




Average height for Japanese males prior to WW II had dropped to 5' 6".

By the early 1990s it had climbed to 5' 9".

The same statistics obtain with respect to average height of British males vs. American males at the time of the American War of Independance, against the catastrophic little ice age conditions giving rise to 'the year without a summer' ---think Valley Forge conditions all around the north Atlantic rim.

Average height for American males had dropped to 5' 6" generally by the times of the American Civil War.

The decline of Egypt as a great power has been ascribed to climate change creating mass migration from Western & Central Africa which put pressure on Egyptian resources leading to civil unrest.

Personally I am very wary of any theory that claims to be *the* reason why any such large civilisation failed. Besides which did it really *collapse*? Really central power dissipated over a period of 100 years or so .

Certainly climate might have been *a* factor but I - and I'm no expert - believe that it was probably one of many contributary factors. With some extensive podcast listening on the subject I can recall amongst other reasons.

They legislated themselves out of power. Power devolved from a central emperor in Rome by patronage - really the fuedal system from the times of Diocletian was already going and without a central Roman Army, of Romans, powerful landowners with private armies gradually took over their own personal fiefdoms. Even when Theodoric took over Rome and gave up the title of emperor he did it in name only as a vassal of Constantinople.

Barbarian invasions - the roman army by the 5th century was mostly made up of these and so if they became rebellious there was no meaningful way to stop them. With the rise of the Huns (a large horse archer confederation from the Steppes) forcing many tribes over the Roman Borders these became ever more numerous and an existential threat. Certainly climate change here may well be a causal factor There is a lot of theory out there on climate changes over time driving steppe nomads out of their normal hunting grounds and since they were so tough and dangerous they drove all before them and into Roman territory - further weakening centralised power.

Economics - tied to the developing feudal system and possible climactic changes and labour shortages.

Corruption. Lets face it they were corrupt and had faced major collapses in unity over many centuries, they were in many ways lucky to have survived so long - see the mess of the crisis of the 3rd century. One of the things the now again famed Palmyra was formerly famous for was governing a breakaway empire at that time.

As I recall from Mike Duncan's history of Rome, he describes these and others as being many among 'the 100 reasons why Rome fell'

Also as I said at the beginning - there was not moment of catastrophe - Rome was not even the capital at the end and the Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, whilst seminal was not the end. People in 427AD in Rome would have been surprised to have learned that the empire no longer existed. Perhaps when Constantinople invaded in the 6th century and all of Italy was devastated in the Gothic Wars - perhaps then is when all got forgotten and then people camped in the ruins and gasped at the 'giants that must have built THAT'

Nevertheless it was eventually catastrophic over time for Europe - there definitely is evidence of significant depopulation in the so-called dark-ages.

The French revolution has as much (if not more) to the Seven Years war with the UK in the americas impoverishing the government and the age of Enlightenment as it has to do with climate change from what I've read.
Why did they have no money for bread for the people? Well maybe because they'd spent it all on disastrous war with the British. The British didn't do so well out of that either of course. The USA did OK

Sorry, bit of a history nerd right here.

I'm wary too of single cause models on any complex phenomenon, not least, climate change itself.

Even without the CO2 contribution of human industry, the world would be in a warming trend currently, the global mean not yet back up to that which obtained in the 13th and 14th centuries.

For all that, global warming does have deletetous effects, for example voral bleaching in Australia's Great Barrier Reef is currently accelerating.

Wish the El Nino system had broken in the direction the Americas rather than towards Australia.

It alternates irregularly, drought in California coinciding with hurricanes and related warming in Australia.

'voral' --- 'coral'